


Forget the life you left behind

by trialbyfic



Series: It's been too long [1]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: 95/5 ratio, Angst, Dissociation, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Loss of Identity, Memory Loss, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts, Yes it Is, due to the dissociation, is it project onto nastya time, though the comfort is very very little
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:21:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24870727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trialbyfic/pseuds/trialbyfic
Summary: "'Startled' is a strong word for it, however. 'Starled' might imply that she has moved- which she hasn't, not for many years. Not since she first laid down beside the last remaining piece of her precious Aurora, all that time ago. If her chest didn't still gently rise and fall with breath, and if her eyes didn't lightly flutter and blink and dart around as she took in the jagged square of metal or the cables, Nastya might've forgotten the concept of moving altogether, like she's slowly begun to forget so many other things."---Out, except nastya has the longest dissociation episode ever instead of leaving the ship.
Series: It's been too long [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1801984
Comments: 12
Kudos: 91





	Forget the life you left behind

**Author's Note:**

> right! so, a few disclaimers:
> 
> 1\. it has been forever since i've written something, and this is my first ever Mechanisms fic, so i apologize if it's Terrible
> 
> 2\. be mindful of the tags, and if i've missed one, please let me know! important cw's are: massive dissociation, and suicidal ideation/thoughts. though, they're less like "i want to kill myself" and more like "wouldn't it be great to be Nothing At All"
> 
> 3\. i had this idea at 4am, and wrote at least 1/3 of it at said time, so if it seems weird and jumpy with the tense/timeline, sorry!
> 
> title is a lyric from "Lotus Eaters" by Jessica Law!

There is a room deep in the Aurora that blocks out all sound from the other parts of the ship, and where and the ship's movement as it soars through space is felt minimally, if at all. Only Nastya knows of this place, and it is not in the blueprints. She hangs out here sometimes, but she doesn't like it very much. It is empty, extremely isolated, and there's not a lot of room. She usually craves some kind of distraction to take her mind off of- well, lots of things. How cold she is all the time, for one. How slowly, yet slowly, she is losing more and more of the original Aurora as repairs strip her down and replace her with new parts. Nastya is losing her love.

  
But over time, as her predicament weighs down on her with more ferocity, she finds herself thinking of isolation more frequently, and more seriously, until it turns into detailed planning and consideration.

  
She figures that sending herself out into space won't do- it is so vast, and it will only make her so much more colder, and she will one day wake up without any control over where, or when, or why. So, her next choice is The Room. It is a spur of the moment decision when she finally heads to it. She'd meant to do something else, but whatever it was slipped from her mind as she found herself wandering to the entrance of the vent that lead to The Room, feeling as if she was on autopilot.

  
The panel is hidden, laying flush with the wall, and Nastya has to slide her fingernails carefully into the thin slits between it and the wall before she can pull it open. Once she does, she shuffles herself inside and closes the panel behind her. The vent is twisting and long, but Nastya does not stop, and eventually crawls her way to The Room. There's a deadbolt on the sliding panel that acts as a door, and she locks it behind her as she enters.

  
The Room is small, but not terribly so. It is slightly bigger than a bathroom, but smaller than her bedroom. There are tangled masses of thick black cables suspended above her from an exposed ceiling, and the metallic walls and floor are a dull dark grey.

  
The last piece of the original Aurora is in her pocket. A small, jagged square of hull metal with the original logo, name, and serial number. Nastya takes her out and sets her on the floor, then lays down beside her.

  
They're approaching Valhöll, and it would've done good to send her Aurora into its sun, Nastya thinks. But, selfishly, Nastya's also glad that she kept her. Her Aurora is here with her, still.

  
Nastya stares at her, eyes tracing her over and over and getting lost in her shapes and colors and lines. Her form seems to break apart and reform itself in Nastya's mind- making the edges straighter, the colors brighter, the numbers properly spaced. It's the mind of an engineer, she supposes. Wanting to mend and repair the battered and broken.

  
Nastya chastises herself for it, though, telling herself that she doesn't need to imagine her Aurora fixed, or better. That this is what's left of her, and she's perfect as she is. So Nastya stops, and instead focuses on her original form, diving into her geometry so deep that Nastya feels like she is seeing fractals.

  
Nastya knows every detail of every fraction of her by now. It spirals in Nastya's mind, the parts spinning and turning in on themselves so intensely that they collide and whirlpool, and they are not separate and they do not end, every point bleeds into the other, into the other, into the other. She is lost in a maze that she can traverse but can't exit, and she stares, stares, stares at the metal on the floor for centuries before she finally looks away-

  
-and straight at the cables above her. These, now, she allows herself to imagined fixed. Nastya trails each wire, mentally untangling it from the rest, pulling it taught and settling it far enough away from the others to hang untouched. She does this so precisely, so intricately, that she almost finds herself believing that the reconstructions she's conducted are real, and she startles badly in the split seconds where she loses focus and comes back to the awful, messy reality of the state of the wires.

  
'Startled' is a strong word for it, however. 'Starled' might imply that she has moved- which she hasn't, not for many years. Not since she first laid down beside the last remaining piece of her precious Aurora, all that time ago. If her chest didn't still gently rise and fall with breath, and if her eyes didn't lightly flutter and blink and dart around as she took in the jagged square of metal or the cables, Nastya might've forgotten the concept of moving altogether, like she's slowly begun to forget so many other things.

  
The memories of her crew- memories of any part of the past that weren't about the room, or anything that had happened in it- were the first to fade. In her self-imposed isolation, it was incredibly easy to forget that anyone else could exist, or ever had. She couldn't hear their gunshots, their shouting, their desperate crawling through the vents in search for Nastya as they realized she's been gone too long. (She's on the ship, they say. Aurora lists 9 passengers. She's gone, they argue. The Aurora is glitching, grieving, and Nastya is actually dead. Nastya is dead, they cry. They cry.)

  
Next, she couldn't recall what anything beyond The Room she resides in looked like. She used to imagine finding the source of the cables, spread and branching throughout the ship as they are, and untangling them from there, but when she stops remembering that she's on a ship altogether, that part of her daydream fades.

  
Then, she loses sense of her tactile experiences. Nastya was cold, she'd known. Always cold. But one day, the concept of temperature trips in her mind, and the frenzied, churning doubt scrubs the facts away, like stains from a wall. (What is heat, or cold? Does it even exist, really? How can something be heavy, or light? Rough, or smooth? Can there truly be opposites, or do they bleed into each other and swirl and combine, just like... that thing on the floor. Whatever that is.) Texture, temperature, weight, all of it- the words to describe it, and, eventually, the very idea of it- are gone.

  
She's stopped focusing on the cables now. She doesn't know when, or why- time was also one of the first things to go, alongside her crew and her past. She might be grateful for that, if she knew what she was missing. Maybe she stopped thinking about the cables when the words to name them left her, or the thought of any form beyond their current presentation became nonexistent, rendering her imagination useless.

  
She hadn't tried very much to hold onto words before this, but once she realizes she could hardly recall them, she becomes frightened, and makes an effort every few centuries to say at least one word. The same one. 'Nastya'.

  
She whispers it, the sound quiet yet still wholly and obtrusively loud in the silence around her. She used to like the word, she thinks. But the way it falls from her lips now, sliding off her tongue like something dead and rancid, she wonders if maybe she never did like it- wonders, until the weight of liking versus disliking something feels far too solid for how twisting and disorienting everything else is, and she lets her words go, too.

  
The fact that she exists, is here and real and living and experiencing and thinking, is the last thing to depart. This, she'd know if she knew how to know, is what she'd craved from the beginning.

  
She used to stare at her arms and legs, entranced by the silver and gray hues of veins sprawling and laced beneath her skin as they thrummed with her quicksilver blood. She'd look at the muscles, tendons, and bones that gave shape to her body, and think that-

-she didn't want a body. She didn't want blood, or bones, or veins. Nor lungs, or a heart, or a brain. She didn't want to exist. She didn't want to know, or be known. She'd rather be formless and unfathomable, one amongst the mist. She'd wish for her atoms to break up their multitudes and spread out in infinite directions, unmaking her in her entirety.

  
And so, in those dreadful millisecond snaps where her selfness comes back to her, she weeps bitterly. For suddenly, she is here, and she is here enough to know that she does not want to be here; enough to know that she could never truly be graced by that wonderfully merciful fate. And it is not fair.

  
Of course, she only knew it wasn't fair back when she had the words and coherent thoughts to know it with. So now, it only resides as an unresolved ache in her soul.

  
Her weeping is quiet, the sound never reaching her own ears. It is always so quiet here.

  
***

  
It is a spur of the moment decision when she moves, one day. A terrible, lonely day. (She can feel loneliness again, and it is an ache in her soul as well, one that contests her bitter wish to be gone forever.) Her hand, stiff from millennia of unuse, stretches out and grasps the deadbolt, fussing with it until it reaches a state that, with a jolt, Nastya remembers as 'unlocked'. Her strength is considerably depleted, but she still manages to slide the panel to the side, and once the door is finally, fitfully opened, her mind is flooded.

  
Nastya crawls through the vent with every fiber of her being screaming at her. The atoms, blood, bone, veins, lungs, heart, muscles, tendons, and brain that she didn't want, yet now endlessly crave to hear and feel are shouting en masse, tearing themselves apart in their fight between 'stop' and 'keep going'. She is on fire and she is freezing to death. She is crushed beneath the immeasurably heavy weight of remembering, of becoming, yet so indescribably light with the euphoria of breaking free from her state of non-being.

  
Nastya is weeping, as she kicks out the panel that sits between her and the Aurora's corridor. She is weeping, as she is here now.

  
Nastya is here now, in front of her former- present?- friends, the commotion drawing them to her. She is with her friends as arms wrap around her, embrace her, carry her through the once and eternally familiar halls to the Common.

  
Nastya realizes belatedly that she's left the last piece of the Aurora's original hull in The Room. She resolves to go back one day (not alone, never alone) and retrieve her, and to give that Aurora a proper goodbye. Perhaps through a cremation in the next star they pass by. 


End file.
